With reports surfacing nationwide of voting machine irregularities and accusations of absentee ballot fraud, former president Jimmy Carter may be tempted to expand his election monitoring efforts here in the U.S. beyond the Cherokee Nation:

† For the first time, any registered voter in IL can cast his or her ballot by mail, but WLS-TV (Channel 7-Chicago) reports that glitches may disenfranchise “that thousands, and potentially hundreds of thousands, of voters” because the ballots are being routed through the Illinois Democratic Coordinated Campaign instead of being sent directly to a local election office:

IDCC officials claim they are entering ballot request information into their own database before sending the mailings on to election authorities who then mail voters the ballot.

The Lake County clerk received a shipment of 500 ballot requests from the IDCC Tuesday. By law, her office has two days to process the ballot requests. The problem is, Thursday is the deadline for election officials to get the ballots out.

IDCC told the clerk that another 1,500 ballot requests are headed to her office, which, she says, may not give her enough time to process all the ballots, potentially disenfranchising voters. …

The IDCC told the I-Team that they used their PO box as the return address because they "are better able to track the process and make sure there are fewer problems."

Meanwhile, IL election officials in 36 counties missed the deadline to send ballots to deployed servicemen and other overseas voters, reports FOXIllinois.com.

† Three Bucks County residents claim that Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-PA) is flooding the county voter registration office with fraudulent applications for absentee ballots, reports Bucks County Courier Times:

In a petition filed Tuesday, county Republicans say the name of Murphy's campaign manager appeared on a Bristol post office box where voters were urged in a series of letters paid for by the state Democratic Committee to send absentee ballot applications.

The county Republicans submitted with the petition a photograph of a note inside the mailbox that said, "Tim Percico and Paul Hampel only pick up mail." Tim Persico is Murphy's campaign manager, although his name is misspelled in the note. Hampel is a volunteer for the Democratic state committee who said he collects mail from the box. …

In response to the Republican petition, the Bucks County Board of Elections scheduled a hearing 9:30 a.m. Friday at the courthouse to hear evidence of what the Republicans characterize as a coordinated effort to trick voters into improperly applying for absentee ballots and efforts to submit fraudulent applications for absentee ballots.

"While some of these invalid applications have been caught and rejected by the Board of Elections, we believe many other defective and objectionable applications were inadvertently approved by the Board of Elections due to the pervasive nature of the fraud," the petition says.

The petition also asks county election officials to secure all completed absentee ballots at the courthouse in Doylestown until the board of elections can conduct an investigation of the claims.

And in FL, Daytona Beach City Commissioner Derrick Henry and his campaign manager, Genesis Robinson, were arrested and charged with committing absentee ballot fraud during Henry’s 2010 re-election campaign, reports WFTV (Channel 9-Orlando).

† In NYC, the Board of Elections voted 6-0 to terminate executive director George Gonzalez after malfunctions in electronic-voting machines, which were being used for the first time during the September 14^th primary and the board “suffer[ing] another humiliation when it was discovered that instructions on the ballot for Tuesday's election … direct voters to fill in ovals "above or next to" the names of candidates [b]ut the ovals on the ballot are situated below the candidates' names,” The Wall Street Journal reports:

Shortly after the commissioners ousted Mr. Gonzalez, Mr. Bloomberg, speaking at City Hall, said, "The problems at New York City's Board of Elections have certainly grown - it's an agency run amok." …

"The reason why there is a total lack of - absence of accountability for how the board functions is because this is the remnants of Tammany Hall," he said, referring to a New York institution of yesteryear known for its political corruption. …

Mr. Bloomberg … called on the state to reassess how board members are selected. The 10 commissioners are appointed by the City Council upon recommendation of the two major political organizations in the five boroughs.

† Tony Scodwell, 67, of Las Vegas says the electronic ballot that appeared on his voting screen popped up already marked for Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), and that he alerted a poll worker who “helped him cast a ballot the way he intended but couldn't explain how a pre-selected choice might have appeared on the screen,” reports Las Vegas Review-Journal:

Clark County registrar of voters Larry Lomax says the scenario Scodwell described "is absolutely impossible" and that he likely brushed the screen inadvertently.

"We've also had complaints from Democrats that they opened the machine and Sharron Angle was marked," Lomax said. "It cannot happen. It doesn't happen. It is because they somehow brushed it."

Scodwell admits there is no way he can prove he didn't inadvertantly touch the screen, though he is certain he did not. However, The Washington Examiner’s Mark Hemingway points out that while “there's absolutely no independently verified evidence of chicanery with the voting machines (yet) … it is worth noting that the voting machine technicians in Clark County are members of the Service Employees International Union [which] spent $63 million in elections in 2008 and is planning on spending $44 million more this election cycle - nearly all of that on Democrats.” He adds: “[T]he SEIU is hyperpoliticized and has seen its fair share of corruption. (It certainly seems more questionable than Diebold, the voting machine manufacturer with Republican ties that was at thecenter of many conspiracy theories on the left during the Bush administration.)

† Craven County voter Sam Laughinghouse says he pushed the button on the electronic voting machine to vote Republican in all races, but the voting machine screen displayed a ballot with all Democrats checked, Sun Journal (New Bern, NC) reports:

He cleared the screen and tried again with the same result, he said. Then he asked for and received help from election staff.

“They pushed it twice and the same thing happened,” Laughinghouse said. “That was four times in a row. The fifth time they pushed it and the Republicans came up and I voted.”

M. Ray Wood, Craven County Board of elections chairman, issued a written statement saying that the elections board is aware of isolated issues and that in each case the voter was able to cast his or her ballot as desired. …

Laughinghouse advises voters to carefully check their ballots before confirming to ensure that the machine is logging each vote as intended.

“If you’re in a hurry, you may just push the button and not notice it,” he said.

He has become suspicious of voter fraud because of news reports he has heard. He would prefer voting machines to display an error message when they need to be calibrated, as opposed to completing ballots for the opposite party, he said.

While Carter is presumably a disinterested party - and therefore impartial – when monitoring elections in Bangladesh, Mozambique and Panama, the same cannot be said here in the U.S. And with Attorney General Eric Holder already on record as dismissing white voter disenfranchisement as a cause for concern (ninth item), Carter has a built-in incentive to ignore irregularities that benefit Dems.